The more things change, the more they stay the same. I’ve always been enthralled by video games, and I spent the better part of my childhood in arcades lining up quarters on the glass screens of shooters like Space Invaders, Galaga and Phoenix to mark my place in line. Some 30 years later, wave shooters are one of the most prevalent VR game genres. Now one of the earliest and most recognized – Space Pirate Trainer (SPT) – has just made its debut as a full-release game after being in early access for well over a year.

At its heart, SPT is very similar to the aforementioned arcade games: fast, frantic and frenetic. The swarm-like, increasingly difficult waves of enemies remind me of a virtual reality Geometry Wars, but with distinct levels and populated with droids and drones instead of shapes.

The concept is simple: grab a gun (or shield, but more on that later) in each hand and blast as many droids as you can out of the air as fast as possible. Your pistols have a variety of fire modes – single-shot, pulse, beam, scattershot, rail, grenades and so on – that can be switched on the fly. Reach over your shoulder and you can swap out your gun for the most interesting – and in my opinion the most challenging yet also most fulfilling – weapons in Space Pirate Trainer: the volton, an energized baton that can transform into a shield, a melee weapon, a lasso and a mobile battery.

In shield mode, the volton will deflect incoming projectiles, and if you get lucky you might just strike a few drones on the return trip. You only get hit if a laser tags you directly where the sensors detect your HMD (although that didn’t stop me from spinning and worming my arms around incoming fire), and while you can just hold the shield up over your face in the early stages making it an easy-yet-blurry cakewalk, the powered buckler is relatively small, so you have to keep an eye out in later levels as projectiles will be coming in quickly and often from 180-degrees and sometimes from above. You can emit a larger force field which will float in front of you and divert approaching lasers , but it’s a quick burst and takes a while to replenish, so you’ll have to be efficient when you use it.

Not only can you pull in droids with the energy lasso and slam them to the ground or bash them with your shield, you can also use the volton to power various environmental weapon placements like a tesla coil and large laser turret that is absolutely devastating to large groups of enemies. Like I said, it’s one of the most interesting, creative and unique weapons in a game that otherwise features pretty standard sci-fi shooter variants.

There are also various power-ups you can activate through rapid combo kills such as hexagonal shield walls, quickfire super lasers and even your own helper drone that will

Your friendly neighborhood Spider-Man returns to AR for some superhero selfies. ‘Spiderman: Into the Spider-Verse’ arrives in theaters December 14th and if early reviews are any indication, Marvel may have yet another hit on their hands. The cross-dimensional animated feature boasts an absolutely stellar voice cast comprised of Jake Johnson (Peter Parker/Spider-Man) and John Mulaney

Bethesda has announced that their upcoming mobile game The Elder Scrolls: Blades will not release until “Early 2019”. The previously stated release window was Autumn 2018. Blades is a new installation in The Elder Scrolls series made for mobile devices and is planned to eventually release on PC, consoles, and even VR headsets.

The game was first announced at E3 2018. On stage, Bethesda’s director & executive producer Todd Howard stated that the game would be available for all levels of VR, from mobile VR to high end PC VR.

The announcement today only mentions that iOS and Android are coming in early 2019. While this could technically also include Android based VR platforms like Oculus Go and Google Daydream, it seems unlikely. The more likely situation here is that the VR version will come later in 2019 (at the earliest) as a lower priority.

It’s not clear what has caused the delay for Blades. In an interview with Geoff Keighley at the time of the announcement, Todd Howard said that his ideal scenario was to release it right after E3. Perhaps the recent issues and controversy with Fallout 76 have caused the company to reprioritize their developers, although it could be unrelated.

We also still don’t know exactly which VR platforms the game will land on. With Oculus Quest releasing in 2019 too however, Blades could be that headset’s biggest hit, or greatest missed opportunity. We’ll keep you updated on any further news about Blades from Bethesda.

Almost a year ago to the day it opened, IMAX is closing down its only European VR center.

The UK-based center in Manchester’s Trafford Odeon cinema has now closed up shop, Variety reports. This is the latest in a long line of closures for the VR initiative, which kicked off in early 2017 with the hopes of becoming one of the definitive location-based VR experiences around the world. Adding in recent closures for centers in New York and elsewhere, IMAX is left with less than half of the locations it opened last year.

Just three centers remain open in Bangkok, Los Angeles and Toronto. IMAX previously confirmed that it has no plans to open up any new locations in 2019.

These centers were billed as ‘pilot runs’ that mainly featured VR experiences you could have at home, like timed demos of Superhot VR and Star Wars: Trials on Tattooine. The company had planned on eventually creating unique experiences that would complement current theatrical releases. Following the closure of New York and Shangai centers in mid-2018 IMAX CEO Richard Gelfond said: “The consumer reaction was extremely positive, but the numbers just weren’t there.”

But trouble has been afoot for IMAX and VR for some time. Earlier this year the company also put the breaks on its work on a premium 360-degree camera being developed with Google. It also planned to partner with Acer and Starbreeze’s StarVR to launch its centers, but most of the locations ended up using an HTC Vive and now there are reports that StarVR could be on the way out too.

For the most part, Gear VR and Oculus Go share almost the exact same content library, but there’s one glaring omission on Go’s side: Minecraft. Mojang’s smash hit game hasn’t shown up on Oculus’ standalone headset since the hardware launched earlier this year, and we’ve long wondered if it would ever arrive.

Well, Mojang says you need to let them know.

A verified Minecraft developer going by the name of CornerHard on Reddit has been encouraging VR fans to tell Mojang it wants the game on Go via a feedback channel on the official website. “I can’t talk about details at this time, but upvoting that feedback link is the best way to tell the people calling the shots that you are interested in Minecraft on Oculus Go,” the developer said.

This adds fuel to a fire initially started by John Carmack, who earlier this month said that there was ‘some progress’ on getting one of two of the most request Go apps onto the platform. The other app was YouTube which launched this month, meaning it’s likely the remaining one is Minecraft.

Right now the feedback channel only has 106 upvotes, so Oculus Go users will need to gather in force if they really want this to become a reality. Given Gear and Go are, in Oculus’ words, ‘binary compatible’, it shouldn’t be too much effort to get the game working on Go in theory. Go does support Bluetooth gamepads, which is all you can use to play the mobile VR version, but we’d love to see the game get full motion controller support too.

The premiere location will launch at LA’s Westfield Century City this December. Location-based VR studio and retailer Dreamscape Immersive this week confirmed the launch of four new state-of-the-art immersive venues across Los Angeles, CA; Dallas/Fort Worth, TX; Columbus, OH; and the New York/New Jersey metro area, in partnership with AMC Theatres. The first location will

We’re diving back into Beat Saber for today’s livestream and focusing on our massive catalog of great custom tracks the community has produced. I’ve got 40 different custom tracks installed, plus the game’s original 10, so we should have plenty of content to peruse on today’s stream. Since we’re focusing on custom songs today, that means the stream will be on the PC version of Beat Saber since the new PSVR version cannot play custom tracks.

We’ll be playing Beat Saber on Rift using a two Touch controllers. We’re starting right around 12:30 PM PT and we’ll aim to last for about an hour and a half or more. We’ll be livestreaming to the UploadVR Twitch page where you can interact with us directly and chat among yourselves. Streaming is something we’re going to double down on doing more often very soon so you should get in on the ground floor of our Twitch community early! You can see the full stream embedded right here down below once it’s up:

Watch live video from UploadVR on www.twitch.tv

You can see our most recent past archived streams over on the UploadVR YouTube channel right here. There’s lots of good stuff there!

Let us know which games or discussions you want us to livestream next and don’t forget to follow the Twitch channel and sign up for notifications.

Sony is launching a new PSVR bundle in the UK, Germany, Austria and Switzerland next week. The ‘Mega Pack’ includes the headset, camera bar, Skyrim VR, Doom VFR, Astro Bot, and WipEout: Omega Collection. It also includes the PlayStation Worlds VR demo reel which gives you a taste of what’s possible in VR.

What the pack doesn’t include is Playstation Move controllers. If you want your hands in VR, you’ll need to buy those separately. They aren’t useful for Astro Bot or WipEout, but for Skyrim VR, and PlayStation VR Worlds and many of the best PSVR games on the store they really take the VR experience to the next level, so we highly recommend buying them too.

The company hasn’t announced the price yet, but given the pricing of the other similar PSVR bundles we’d expect it to come in at around £200-£250. This is a box that will be under many European Christmas trees this year.

Skyrim VR

The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim VR is the whole game brought into virutal reality – DLC and all. This is no “experience” or experiment, this is the whole >100 hour game and all of its gameplay mechanics. We were highly impressed when we reviewed the game, stating:

For a game that wasn’t originally designed for VR at all and has been ported first to the least powerful of the big three VR platforms in the PSVR, Skyrim VR is nothing short of impressive. This really is the Skyrim that you know and love, but now you can enjoy it like never before with the immersive presence of a VR headset. With a large variety of control schemes to choose from and hundreds of hours of content, this is a game that all RPG fans should play as long as you can look past the sometimes glaring issues. And if you don’t own a PSVR yet, luckily there’s a new Skyrim VR bundle with your name on it.

DOOM VFR

DOOM VFR is not a port, it’s an entry in the popular gore shooter franchise made specifically for VR. While it provides some great VR action, there are some problems on the PSVR version. As we stated in our review:

While Skyrim VR made a great case for the VR port, Doom VFR brings us back to the drawing board. On PSVR, the game has its moments, largely thanks to the foundations it was built upon with the 2016 original. In the end, though, the real fight is with its awkward control setups that eventually led me back to play with just a standard gamepad. Though the foundations of a hugely enjoyable shooter are intact, VFR’s struggle with the platform’s limitations makes it feel like the VR support is holding it back more than anything.

Astro Bot Rescue Mission

Astro bot is one of those games that proves that 3rd person platformers can work just as well as 1st person games in VR. We really enjoyed reviewing this game, concluding:

A man in Mexico City turns his first tattoo into a trigger for a prototype AR game. The impact of AR technology on our daily lives gets greater and greater each day as it finds its place in how we learn, how we perform our jobs, purchase items on the internet, home repairs, stay connected